About Me

My name is Ben Mathis and I'm an experienced 3D freelance artist. I've been working in the game industry since 2003. I've contributed to eleven shipped titles in the game industry, and one feature film as a modeler and lighting artist.

I've also worked for several years in conjunction with different toy companies to make digital sculpts that have been turned into toys. I've worked for numerous studios both in-house and remote.

I specialize in creating characters, animals, weapons, and vehicles, for any generation of system, though I've also contributed to level design, lighting, and compositingI also create training material and pipeline enhancement.

I enjoy coming up with new tools and processes, and then sharing them with the rest of my team. When possible, I also enjoy showing those results to the rest of the world, so that the video game industry as a whole can benefit and move forward with better art.

Portfolio

FGOL Hungry Sharks

Having completed most of the playable sharks in the previous Hungry Sharks title, I was tasked with modeling and texturing the majority of player sharks for Hungry Sharks World. 2D concepts were provided, and I delivered the assets as shown.

Halo Toy Sculpts

High resolution, water-tight meshes, sculpted for McFarlane Toys and used to produce the Halo Toy line. You can see the physical Warthog toy here. One further example, Mecha Spawn.

Rotor Assets

Rotor is a product of Snjohus Games, a small studio consisting of myself and my husband. It is available on the Google play store here (with trailer).
All ship designs by me. Most textures are 256x256, but a few are 128x128. All ships are 450 triangles or less.

Hungry Sharks Evolution Assets

These were made for the first 3D version of Hungry Sharks by Future Games of London. Textures from the shark come heavily from the original concepts, but all other assets were created from scratch by me.

Personal realistic bust practice

I was lacking some more realistic head models in my portfolio so set out to fill that gap. Based off a mid-20s Icelandic male. Textures are 95% photo reference. Normal map comes from a Sub-D surface and small details from crazybump.

Mobile game asset

The studio provided a 2D concept from one angle, and gave me a texture limit and triangle count (735 triangles plus a 512x512 RGBA texture). I needed also keep track of total completion time which was 14 hours including rigging.

News

February 14th, 2016

Completely new look

I've neglected the site for the past couple of years so I thought it was time to re-design the page, modernize it and also provide fresh new tutorials and artwork. Look out for some more original work in the near future.

June 17th, 2014

Portfolio Update

Finally, like 2 years later, I edited and uploaded part 1 of my lecture at Carnegie Melon's Entertainment Technology Center. I cover a lot of the process of creating the bust to the right.

March 3rd, 2013

Our game is out

Our game is out! Grab Rotor on Google Play. Trailer below. If you have benefited or enjoyed my tutorials over the years, I would really appreciate if you download the free version and rate it positively and give it a nice comment. Liking the Youtube trailer helps too. This was made by 4 people, myself for all 3D and UI, Ágúst, my husband for all programming, Peter Boehme for the intro illustrations, and Ian Dorsch for the music. Head over to my 3D page to see the art from Rotor, as well as some new low poly art from Hungry Sharks Evolution.